


The Winning of Marianne Brandon

by AHeatheredDown



Category: Sense and Sensibility (1995), Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Genre: F/M, Mostly movie canon, and margaret will make an appearance, but some book canon for timelines and previous events etc., i like the jennings family setup better in the movie, some book canon events for flavor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-15 01:33:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20858021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AHeatheredDown/pseuds/AHeatheredDown
Summary: Brief vignettes and longer explorations of what won the romantically-minded and once-bitten Marianne Dashwood over to the grave Colonel Brandon - and addressing what remains of her heart to be conquered after they are wed, including the thorny question of Beth, his fallen ward, who is scarcely younger than herself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly movie canon with a dash of book canon. Will stretch out in some later chapters especially as they pertain to Beth! 
> 
> This is the first fic I have ever posted. Please be gentle. :)

On the night that Marianne Brandon took her husband to bed for the first time, she discerned by candlelight the gnarled shape of a scar draped over his collarbone and instantly regretted that she did not check her expressions.

Her husband—a strange thought; a strange word to use now, for this man—withdrew gently into the shade of the bed’s canopy, turning his face away and nervously winding his cravat over and around his hands. There was a tension in him that she, for all her insight, at first did not understand, until she realized that it was shame, and just as quickly realized that it was for the state of a body that she might in some way find repulsive for not being as young, as unmarred, as upright and sportsmanlike as another that had in all likelihood filtered into her less-guarded daydreams.

“I—am sorry—” he began, and Marianne reached to quiet him, a hand laid across his arm despite his almost-flinch. She could not bear to hear this man, this good man, apologize for being what he was, when what he was had become so dear.

“I had only thought,” she said lowly, reaching up with her free hand to loosen the stays of her chemise and letting it fall from her shoulder, “that it should be strange that we should have so many stories yet untold between us.”

He dared a glance at her, first at the curve of her fire-gilded shoulder at then, with nervous and solemn bravery, at her eyes. “I hope you do not find me remiss—”

“I do not,” she interrupted, and she coaxed him nearer, trembling in an effort to hide her own fear. Some months ago her sister had spent months forcing her own bravery to shield Marianne’s vulnerabilities, and now, she thought, she might well pay the courage forward. “We have,” she reminded him in a whisper, “time enough now to tell them at our leisure.”

Hesitating only a moment, he guided the chemise lower, and lower still, until she withdrew her bare arm to loop it around his equally-bare neck.

For a moment her thoughts slipped back over the past few months, over the strange and tumultuous fate of Marianne Dashwood—Marianne Brandon—until with the touch of his mouth she left the memories for another time, and succumbed to the nervous joys of the present.

* - * - *

She had had no thoughts of falling in love, not any more than she had had thoughts of being fallen in love with to begin with. She had merely sought comforts, and by the gently affectionate machinations of her mother and the genuine good intentions of her sister she found that one of those comforts had been Colonel Brandon, positioned beside her bed in that peculiarly stiff and upright posture that she had once attributed—how foolish now—to gout, to rheumatism, to the infirmity of age. Even in her exhausted state, her body and senses wracked by fever and muddled by the doctor’s wine-heavy draughts, it seemed so clear to her now that he moved as he did only out of a self-consciousness that in its way, she reflected, was not unlike Edward’s. Connecting the two made the very stiffness she had once attributed to his age seem youthful, even boyish: a shyness and fear of offending that would have better suited a man half his years. He had always been so gentle.

And he was gentle now: somewhat against her wishes Sir John had dispatched a puppy for her comfort, and it was serving now as more of a comfort to Colonel Brandon, who rested one hand on its silky forehead until he needed to turn the page of the book he was reading aloud to her. Through the haze of half-sleep that slipped in and out of her she watched him stroke the puppy’s ears, distracted and sweet, and only once did she think of Willoughby’s pointer reclining at her feet, still panting from a hard run behind the carriage.

She had not thought that she much liked dogs—they were noisy, and tore her dresses—but Willoughby had won her over so easily to his hounds in the way that he won her over to everything he loved, and this puppy, in its paw-twitching sleepiness, was still sweeter than even his gentlest pointer. The man had quit her life but he had left behind some footprints, this among them. She reached out sleepily and her fingers brushed the Colonel’s before he drew them away, his words—he was reading Cowper beautifully—suspended. Embarrassed, she did not meet his gaze.

“I am sorry, Colonel,” she said, her voice still low and hoarse from her long illness. “I had not meant to interrupt.” And then, fondly: “How soft it is.”

He did not forgive her, or say that no apology was necessary. He was only silent, his motion arrested until he could with difficulty and abruptness fling himself back into the passage with only a slight ripple in his delivery.

Later when the draughts had worn off she would think of the incident with mortification, and gratitude that Mrs. Jennings had not been about to see it and tease her with a significance it did not have.

She knew that the Colonel loved her. It surprised her only a little to realize that she trusted him, despite this, more than she did Mrs. Jennings not to attribute to the action more than it meant. That until such a day as she touched his hands with purpose, he would steadfastly respect her intentions with her own.

_Until_, she thought. _Until_ such a day? What a funny word to think of there. A word that implied that such a day must inevitably come.

* - * - *

The Colonel read beautifully. This was generally acknowledged, as he had often been called upon to read a passage or two on a dull evening. But Marianne Dashwood, as the days slipped by and her strength returned, felt certain that in some way that no one knew quite how beautifully but herself (save for some long gone—but to dwell on such a thought seemed strange and painful). Away from the pressure of a roomful of eyes, with no ears but her own to hear and no taste but her own for him to trust, the stiffness and uncertainty gave way, and the rantings of great dramas and the soft music of great poetry were equally lovely in his mouth. She suspected that he had no turn for comedy—she thought with a pang of Willoughby in his saucy passages, his sparkling eyes searching hers before she burst into laughter—but this she might forgive him, when sonnets took such meaning under the baritone gravity of his voice.

Her emotions already fraught by her illness and all her many regrets, she listened to him turn the words of a verse over in his steady graveness:

_She dwelt among the untrodden ways_  
_Beside the springs of Dove,_  
_ A Maid whom there were none to praise_  
_ And very few to love—_

How long, she thought, since any way in his heart had been untrodden, and how likely even now that he thought of the first to tread there. The Lucy in his heart, who now, like Wordsworth’s, had gone to her anonymous grave. How tenderly must he be moved by such lines, and how she cursed herself for suggesting this volume without remembering this within its pages. She felt in the swell of his words and the lingering way he dwelled over some lines the pain, the horrible pain, of a heartache still worse and more wretched than her own. It was not his eyes that filled with tears, but hers, when he glanced up to her and he faltered: “Fair as a star, when only one—”

“I am sorry,” she whispered. “It is—it is only a headache,” she said, and without speaking and with real concern he reached for a cool cloth from the basin. It turned him towards the window, and when she saw in the beam of sunlight the glossiness of his eyes, she choked back a feeling that she could not name: something like pity, something like heartache, and something like the curiosity that came with gazing upon a locked door that might hide secrets or horrors or delights or all in equal measure. She would have turned away in disgust from a path already walked in the heart of a man, but now that it lay glancingly open before her she found it inviting as much as it was painful.

She had always loved (hadn’t she?) to feed her own pain, and if new resolutions stirred in her already, they were still not quite strong enough to drive off the old habit.

She had been heartless once, to think him without a heart. It opened itself to her night after night in the gentleness of his voice, and now it laid itself bare in this quiet moment that both of them, turned away from one another, acted as if had not passed. It was an act of restraint that even Elinor may have applauded, but which she must never know of. It was, she realized, a moment only for the two of them: for Marianne Dashwood and for Colonel Brandon. Such a thing, she thought, had never existed before. Might never exist again.

* - * - *

In the future Marianne Brandon would trace her fingers over her husband’s new scars, and before she could whisper a reassurance in his ear he would whisper one in hers that she had not been willing to admit she needed.

In the future Marianne Brandon would glance from her marriage bed at the volume on the bedside table before she leaned to blow out the candle and fall into the darkness and her husband’s arms.

In the future all these things, but in the present Marianne Dashwood woke up in the cramped comfort of her sickbed, and when a knock at the door admitted the maid she realized, with some confusion of spirits, that she was disappointed that it did not admit Colonel Brandon.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A very short stroll is all that Marianne is capable of assaying, but it is enough time to say more than she should despite her best intentions.

No one likes to admit that she’s wrong, let alone someone like Marianne Dashwood, who had always prided herself on scorning the counsel of others. 

And yet Marianne Dashwood was willing to concede—in behavior if not in word—that Mrs. Jennings had earned her respect, at the very least. Once the delirium of fever had passed she had seen the depths of the good woman’s kindness and genuine love for her, and it had been painful to remember with what incivility she had often treated her. 

Still, however—esteem was not equal to intimacy. She was still too loud, even in her whispering to spare Marianne’s head, still too inquisitive about the Colonel, still too gossipy and gay and busy. She could no longer despite the old woman, but she could still be wearied by the excesses of her attention, and so it was with some relief that she escaped outdoors when an opportunity presented itself amidst a particularly rambunctious post-dinner card game unfolding in the sitting room. Even her mother, in the profound joy of seeing her daughter recovered to a degree she had scarcely hoped, when days before she had been imagining her laid out in her funeral gowns, was alight with a nearly girlish joy, and the oppressiveness of the noise and the gaiety had worn itself on Marianne’s nerves. 

Elinor had risen to accompany her, as none of them—not even Marianne—had quite faith in her abilities to support herself even on a stroll in the little lawn in front of the Palmers’ house. But Mrs. Jennings in her usual schemes had waved her down. 

“You cannot abandon us in the middle of a round!” she cried. “And Colonel Brandon has just cut out, you see.” 

All her old bad feelings rose in her at such an impudence, but she caught her mother’s eye and to her mortification saw that she was as much hopeful as she was solicitous for her comfort. She was aware at once that a word from herself would stop the plan, and also that it would be a small disappointment to her mother. 

Her mother had had a great many disappointments of late, and how many of them had been due to her own unwillingness to exercise self-denial, as Elinor did? She hesitated only an instant.

“What a—kind suggestion, Mrs. Jennings,” she said, and she forced a smile, which was something ill-done, as she didn’t have much practice in it. Perhaps, she thought—uncharitably, it must be said—one day she might fake a smile as well as her own dear Elinor. But she could conceive from the Colonel’s grave demeanor that he was not nearly as fooled as the complacent Mrs. Jennings, who turned back to her hand with a noticeable triumph. He was, however, enough a gentleman not to look hurt.

His arm, at least, was sturdier than Elinor’s. It was sturdier even, she found, than Willoughby’s had ever been. It made sense, of course, now that she considered it—a seasoned soldier vs. a decadent sportsman—but in her head Willoughby had always been the strongest and most capable of men, and it would be some time before such a pedestal could be dismantled.   
Well bundled in her shawl, she was almost too warm in the unseasonable mildness of the evening. In deference to Marianne’s need for an early bedtime they had dined early and lightly, and the sun was only just falling. The neat rows of trees, artificially cleaned of their brush, had offended Marianne’s tastes when she had first seen them, for being too formal and constrained. But even she had to admit that the long bars of shade they cast across the lawn—a blanket of purple and gold stripes—were beautiful in their own way. 

“A shame Elinor could not accompany me,” she said thoughtlessly, “for she would have been inspired to draw such a thing, I am sure.” And then her cheeks flamed in embarrassment, and awkwardly she had the need to cover her frankness: “I appreciate your—gallantry in offering to save her her spot at the game.” 

“It was hardly a gallantry to make myself useful to you,” he said with grave gentleness. “Consider it more a favor to myself. I am—it is a blessing, to see you so well.” 

“I can hardly believe my recovery myself,” she said. “Some nights ago I felt sure that I was breathing my last, when I could—when I could be present enough to think anything at all.” She hesitated, uncertain. “I know that Elinor has said so many times, but I must sincerely thank you again and again for fetching my mother. The comfort—” she could not finish, swallowing back her emotion at recalling waking to see her mother’s dear, anxious face. And at perceiving over her shoulder, when they embraced, Colonel Brandon’s face at the door, and instantly understanding how she had come to be there. 

“You seem determined,” he answered with a ghost of a smile, “to heap upon me praise for doing things which were done in the service of my own feelings. When—I was very disturbed by your state, Miss Dashwood. Such friends as I am with your family,” he added, as if she could ever be confused as to the true nature of his fear for her, “I grieved for you as if they were my own relations. And when my feelings are disturbed, I can no more sit and do nothing than a river can run backwards.” 

“I am just the same way,” she cried in a sudden sympathy for this man, especially as she compared him to staid, steadfast Elinor, who could sit as motionless as a stone if the situation needed, and had done so again and again amidst the indignities of Willoughby and the pain of Edward. “I feel I must have movement, employment—my agitation so soon outstrips me—” 

“And so you pace from room to room like a beast in a cage at Exeter,” he said. “We—we quite understand one another,” he added, with a gentleness that made her cheeks run red again, and made her grateful for the failing light. 

For some moments she was silent. It had been her intention—_was_ her intention, in this moment—to learn from the model of her sister. To bind herself to propriety even when propriety felt false. It was an unaccustomed feeling, to shy away from what seemed like an invitation to intimacy in a person she felt had earned her esteem. They turned back towards the house.

“I imagine, Colonel,” she said, holding herself stiffly away from the support of his arm as much as her flagging strength would allow, to put some distance between them, “that we quite understand one another in more ways than one. We have been—we have been loved by the same people, and wronged by the same man, although in different ways. With such similarities of circumstances there must be some—some similarity of spirits, somewhere.” 

It was as well that she’d taken the precaution of remaining so stiff and upright. He could not look at her, but stared straight ahead at the Palmer house, his face very white as they passed through one of those purple bars of shade, and for a moment she feared that in her recklessness and her untrained fumbling she had given a significance to the expression that it did not warrant.

Another moment however brought them into a golden streak of dying light, and her spirits rallied as she looked away from him and over the hill sloping away from the lawn. No, she thought firmly. While she might master the freedom of her words she must never entirely chain them away. She must not become Elinor in her quest to become a better version of Marianne—she must remain herself, and true to those things which made her Marianne Dashwood, even as she learned to temper them with sense. What she said had been perfectly true. The Colonel had never shown any desire to override her heart—had never made an offer; had never even told her what he had known of Willoughby lest she see it as some attempt to drive them apart. He had earned this confidence far more than Willoughby ever had, and while she could esteem him as a friend she would not deprive him of it despite what a shock it may be to his feelings. 

Instinctively she tightened her fingers around his arm. “I am sorry,” she said. “I—misjudged my own strength. I am quite ready to sit down again.” 

“Should we pause?” he asked, as they were now nearing a low wall on which she might comfortably be seated, with his arm to support her. 

“I had—I had meant in the sitting room. But it is so warm by the fire, and although the fever has passed I—I feel so warm still, at times. Let us pause,” she agreed, and she allowed herself to be guided to a seat on the sun-warmed stone, pulling her shawl close despite her statements about being too warm. 

She expected that he might say something, dreaded lest he might, but he was silent. It was surely all noise within, but on the striped lawn with Colonel Brandon it was all silence. She studied the shape of his face, rimmed gold by the nearly-set sun, and considered that although it was not handsome, the gravity of his expression, which had been so disgusting to her once, seemed now like the height of amiableness. Even more so, that he kept his peace and did not interrupt her with fastidious concern for her, or a need to fill the silence with small and empty talk. 

She thought again of what she had told him, that they might have quite a bit in common, and she turned her eyes to follow his over the lawn. Perhaps it had been truer than even she had suspected when she said it. She leaned on his arm, therefore, despite the fact that she remained seated, and wretchedly she wondered whether, in the openness of her esteem, she was in her own way being as cruel and careless with his heart as Willoughby had been hers—as even Edward had been with Elinor’s. She thought this, but she did not let go of his arm, and even tightened her fingers around it when finally, without a word, they rose to return to the house by the last shreds of light. He released her onto Elinor’s arm as she met them at the door, and he bowed very low, and said nothing as he withdrew, not even to wish her a goodnight.


End file.
